Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, everybody.
Today's question comes from Stockholm, Sweden.
Jimmy wants to know, "Will Google offer the feature to
search with regular expressions?
When, or why not?
I feel that sometimes you really want to be able to
write very specific search queries where the normal
operators and operands aren't enough."
Great question, Jimmy.
I tend to agree with you.
Unfortunately, the number of people who really want to
search with regular expressions
is vanishingly small.
And the amount of infrastructure and extra
indexing space that it would take is quite large.
So, for example, when we started to offer numb range
searches, which you can still do.
You can search for Mount Everest, feet high, and then
you can search for 29,000 dot, dot, dot,
or dot, dot to 32,000.
And it will search for anything in that number range.
That's a really neat power-user function, but it
takes a significant amount of index space to be able to
support that.
It's not huge, but it's definitely not trivial.
So not enough people really have asked to be able to the
search with regular expressions.
On the bright side, if you ever want to get a job at
Google, you can run a MapReduce over the entire web,
and then you can write your own regular expressions and
search over the content of stuff that we've crawled
pretty easily.
But at least to be able to surface that to the sort of
people who do over a billion searches a day, it would take
enough indexing and infrastructure capacity when
it's probably not worth it as far as building the
amount of work in.
So I wouldn't expect that any time soon, sorry to say.